Chemtech November 1997 & the only time the Alberich pseudonym got through.
As the cliché says, Love moves in mysterious ways. Couples pair off or split up for reasons that seem to make little sense to others. Something often appears to be at work that’s stronger than common sense or even physical attraction. The challenge to the chemist therefore is: “Can we put that something in a bottle?”
So, my mind has been much addressed recently by the opportunities for our profession in olfactory match-making, and particularly in synthesising major histocompatibility complexes (mhc’s) to order. You may, and should, recall the announcement made a couple of years ago by researchers in Switzerland, on the role of smell in selecting your partner. It all comes down to the human immune system. Apparently, females find the smell of possible mates most alluring when their mhc’s differ as much as possible from their own - their offspring will thus be immune to a wider range of pathogens and parasites.
The commercial implications, particularly for perfume manufacturers, are staggering, and a number of fascinating questions spring to mind. Is this only a one-way effect? And if so, why? Surely males should be just as interested in the health of their offspring as females. If men can indeed detect these compounds in women, then what is the role of conventional perfume? Does it give a broad-spectrum appeal, or does it mask the mhc smell? If not, then is this why far more girls wear perfume than boys?
Even if it is only a unidirectional effect, the cosmetics companies should nevertheless be drooling. You can picture young males who fail to attract the girl of their dreams, struggling to obtain a small sample of dna from the object of their desires. Probably to begin with they would need a buccal swab - not so easy to obtain surreptitiously, and potentially a cause of a number of bizarre muggings. Eventually, however, it should be possible to manage with nail clippings, items of soiled clothing, or, most romantically, a lock of the beloved’s hair. Then, for a fee, the parfumier-chemists would be able to synthesise a tailor-made scent, guaranteed to haul in the quarry. The initial fee needn’t be too large - if the product works the client will be back for more, and in the event of marriage he could be in thrall to the laboratory for the rest of his life.
The ardent swain would still have to be careful, of course. The chances are that the same set of mhc’s would attract the attention of assorted sisters and cousins, and even the mother, of the fair lady. Not necessarily unwelcome, you understand, but it could lead to complications. He would also have to pay attention to where and when he washed. A thoughtless shower and weeks of wooing and a small fortune would swirl down the drain. He couldn’t go out with his new girl-friend in heavy rain, while sea bathing together would be a disaster.
There are other implications. It turns out that women using oral contraceptives respond to a different set of mhc’s (ones closer to their own) than those they favour when they are available for breeding. The suspicion is that the high incidence of divorce among couples married for a couple of years may be linked to women coming off the Pill and finding they don’t like their partner’s smell any more. How many marriages could be saved by a trip down to the perfume labs? Perhaps couples filing for divorce should be required to try mhc-aroma matching first. This could reasonably be publicly funded - after all it would keep down the number of single-parent families requiring state assistance. If this is successful, would gene therapy make sense for a permanent fix? However, there’s one major shadow I can foresee if all this comes to fruition. If the use of such products became widespread it could lead to in-breeding and seriously harm humanity’s immune response. Perhaps the opposite approach should be taken - couples proposing marriage should be encouraged to smell each other “neat” before taking the plunge.
One thing the Swiss researchers didn’t make clear was the relative strength of the effect compared to, say, good looks or a sense of humour. If it lags behind these in importance, can it be boosted by using an extra-powerful scent? Another thing - could a general purpose scent be synthesised, one that signals all the mhc’s yet discovered, and therefore attracting every female in the world? Would it still be species specific? (You wouldn’t want to be followed around all the time by all the bitches and she-cats in the neighbourhood.) Unravelling all this is going to take some time, but fortunately we chemists will be at the forefront. Ugly bores who are in the know could suddenly become objects of desire, and I want to be there first.
Unpublished - a couple of editors were tempted but their journals folded before they could print it.
Lines Written for an Innovation Seminar,
October 2003
Perhaps I am a number in a homomorphic space,
but do not set me free, for I fear annihilation.
My own reality depends on putting bonds in place
and influencing others with the spores of my creation.
Chemical formulations, the solutions that I spin,
form fragile threads that brush the cheeks of those who, unaware
of polymeric artistry, ignore the chains within
their mundane household artefacts, or knowing, do not care.
Those I know will soon be gone, my products superseded.
So I dust the winds with concepts that mentally infest
a broader world of vectors, for carriers are needed
to delocalise one’s being, to partially arrest
descent of Entropy’s declivity
by continuous creativity.
This one appeared in Chemtech, June 1997
Is it possible, I wonder, to form a deep meaningful relationship with a lump of basalt or a carbonaceous chondrite?. Potter lovingly around your water-glass garden? Something mineral anyway. The reason I ask is that I’ve tried to get on with the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms and it has been bitterness and recriminations all down the line.
My problems with pets began at an early age. My friends and I would sometimes win goldfish at the fair. Theirs would thrive, mine would be belly-up the next day. If we were running in the streets, neighbours’ dogs would watch everyone else benevolently, but would shoot out at me and try to get a taste of my clothing. Once, playing Cowboys and Indians, I was tied to a lamppost, awaiting rescue by the cavalry, when a dog came and raised its leg at me.
Other animals have been just as bad. Cute little kittens take lumps out of me when I try to feed them. Ponies who have never been known to hurt a soul have kicked me, hamsters have bitten me. I couldn’t even get frog-spawn to hatch. I obviously give off a complex mix of pheromones, inciting fear in small mammals, loathing in the fiercer ones, suppression of development in amphibia and death in fish.
And yet I still wanted a pet. Madness, I know. The question was: What should I get? Almost by a process of elimination I came up with the idea of a lizard. My female friends were horrified: what did I want such a disgusting pet for? I had to admit that it wouldn’t be the prettiest, most companionable of animals, but at least it would be relatively harmless, and shouldn’t, I thought, be too difficult to look after.
The trouble was, the local pet shop didn’t have any lizards and didn’t want to stock any either. But help was at hand in the school biology lab. The same people who supplied mice and rabbits for unpleasant experiments also had "Green Lizards" in their catalogue, and relatively cheap too. So I sent off my order, and a few weeks later a box arrived with little wire-mesh windows, and signs saying "This Way Up" and "Handle With Care". Excitedly I opened it, only to be deflated when I extracted what appeared to be a small piece of shrivelled chamois leather. I assume the poor thing had failed to survive the journey, but not necessarily. Perhaps they had thought I was a sorcerer and needed a dried lizard for one of my potions.
Undeterred, I packed the victim into a cigarette box and sent it back, with a terse note explaining that what I really wanted was a live animal. This time when the parcel arrived it made funny scurrying noises, and my mum wouldn’t touch it. Excellent. I finally had my pet. I stuck it in a fish tank with a few rocks and trotted off to the local library to find out what green lizards liked to eat. Perhaps I should have done this a little earlier, for that was when I found out that they would only eat grass-hoppers. Brilliant. Where on Earth was I going to get grass-hoppers from in inner-city Liverpool?
Fortunately, the gardeners in the nearby public park allowed me and a few creepy-crawlie resistant companions to scour their nursery area for whatever we could find. I brought back a huge, living entomological collection, but no grass-hoppers. Surely Lizzy would find something to his (or her? - I never found out) taste amongst that lot. Well yes, but all it would touch were the wood-lice. Now, I couldn’t imagine that there would be much nutrition in a wood-louse. They seem to be mostly dust. Certainly Lizzy spectacularly failed to thrive. He or she lost weight, came out in spots, and soon resembled the first sample the biological suppliers had sent me.
That was it for pets for about thirty years. We now have cats, thanks to our daughters’ insistence, but except for when I feed them they won’t have anything to do with me. Attempts to stroke them are met with a cold stare. They’re probably alarmed by the smell. But they should consider themselves lucky. They should see me with plants. Lethal.
My wife won’t let me near any planting out in the garden. Controlled destruction is OK - weeding, mowing the lawn, or chopping branches off trees - but nothing creative. It would just be a waste of time and money. Remember the complementary colour to green in physics?. Magenta fingers. That’s what I’ve got.
How do you kill Spider Plants, short of spraying them with Agent Orange? There’s not many people that can do it, but I can, easily. Once, during a particularly cold spell, I left one too near the window when I went away for a couple of days. On my return the leaves, now black and decidedly unvariegated, were pointing sadly to the floor. With another I don’t think I did anything wrong, lots of tender loving care, but it died anyway. Or so I thought - the truth was even sadder. I put the pot in a leaky old shed and forgot about it for years. Eventually, clearing the place out before moving house, we found the plant, healthier than we had ever seen it before.
If ever my wife is away and I’m left to look after the delicate little ferns or even the tomato seedlings, we can rest assured that it is adieu for half of them, rather than au revoir. Friends and neighbours used to ask us to look after their Yuccas for them when they went on holiday, but they don’t do it any more, in case I get involved. Herbicide manufacturers are showing an interest - if they could isolate the molecule I give off it would revolutionise their industry, so they sit me in cubicles and wave gas chromatographs at me
So it’s down to minerals. Perhaps I can decorate my window ledge with seashells, natural crystals, pieces of coral. But even there I have my doubts. I once helped myself, naughtily, to a small stalactite from a cave I was visiting. In a few days all I had left was a little heap of powdered calcium carbonate.
"The Ascent of Rum Doodle" is a sort of comic "Zen of Mountaineering". As one of my favourite passages makes clear, the true sceptic has to doubt even his own scepticism. Wish, the scientist on the expedition, tries to explain this to the climb leader:
"He was sent down from university for steadfastly refusing to believe anything which was taught him. ... But having come down he found, as many a young man had found before him, that the world of men and affairs was a vastly different place from the world of his imaginings. His first rude awakening occurred one Saturday afternoon in the saloon bar of The Psychic Psquirrel. Wish had been holding forth in his usual way and had, he thought, expounded his Theory of Scepticism with particular clarity and brilliance. When he had finished, an elderly, rather disreputable-looking gentleman of the eccentric type spoke a few quiet sentences which quite removed Wish's self-satisfaction. He said he would not deny that Wish showed certain faint glimmerings of promise as a sceptic. But he had far to go. He must learn the elementary truth that the real sceptic is sceptical by character rather than conviction; the intellectual drapery in which he clothes his scepticism has as little importance as the demonstrations of the believer — it is, indeed, more likely to veil than to reveal the naked Truth. Moreover, knowing that his mind will enable him to doubt everything, the sceptic scorns the crudity of stating his disbelief; he merely lives it. But even this, the gentleman said, was going too far. The true sceptic would refuse even to believe in himself and his own scepticism. He would maintain an openness of mind indistinguishable from complete mindlessness and an openness of character indistinguishable from utter lack of character. His scepticism would find its ultimate expression in the acceptance of random prejudice as being as sound a basis for living as the most carefully reasoned philosophy. This, he said, was the ultimate faith, for it scorned intellectual pretext. He said that the true sceptic was far stronger in faith than any believer."
My favourite cartoonist.
http://www.glenbaxter.com/frameset/frameset.html
Here's one of my favourite examples, the sceptics motto:
“The difficult thing is to comprehend the lack of foundation of our belief”. I'm showing off here. Glen Baxter is relatively free with his e-mail address, so I asked him where the quote came from. He told me it was from Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”. Although my spoken German is on the hesitant side, I can read it pretty well. I therefore bought the book, and struggled through it – no trace of the quote! In fact, it’s from a different Wittgenstein book, “Über Gewißheit” – a much easier read. Glen Baxter also says that Leeds is in Belgium.
I'd like to put up some books from Amazon.de but currently Vox doesn't have a link to it. Interestingly, when I bought the (right) book from them it was one of those with a built in bookmark, and someone had placed the mark on the right page for the quote!
& this one in CHEMTECH January 1997
I was reading recently about work that drew a link between clinical depression with infection with a particular virus, and it set me thinking. If it turns out there are such things as mood-altering viruses, the implications are astonishing. Psychiatry and psychology would be revolutionised. It could herald the end of the world as we know it, or at least affect the result of the next election.
My first question on reading the piece was: "What’s in it for the bug?" What evolutionary advantage does the virus gain by making its victim miserable? Is it particularly fond of alcohol, or nicotine, or chocolate? More probably, acute depression could lower the body’s immune response, making the virus’s life easier. Do immuno-suppressed people get depressed more easily than the rest of the population? I suspect that they do. Of course the symptom could merely be an unfortunate side-effect of the infection, conferring no benefit to the pathogen.
Does the virus tend to spread more in winter, like influenza, offering an alternative explanation for S.A.D? Depression is more prevalent in some countries than in others. Does this imply that some populations have a natural resistance to the disease?
Whatever, imagine what a biological warfare establishment could do with such a beastie. Virulent infectious or contagious strains could be released into enemy nations, to sweep through the populace, damaging economic output and reducing the will to fight. In response, security forces would have to mount a special look-out at the airports for sad people trying to enter the country. On the other hand the bugs could be targeted at political leaders - watch out for those hand-shakes at summit meetings.
If the depression is only a side-effect, if perhaps the brain’s reaction to certain antigens involves the production of a depressant, or if the virus just happens to excrete a psycho-active chemical, then many other possibilities arise. Could other moods be influenced by infections? Violent anger, perhaps. Are the world’s trouble spots plagued by endemic psychoviruses? All sorts of obsessive or deviant behaviours could be candidates.
Obviously if there are such infectious diseases about we would need to find treatments for them. But interesting public health questions then come to mind. Should we consider attempting to eradicate these viruses, by compulsory medication? There would certainly be pressure to stamp out what society sees as "bad" moods. A Brave New World wouldn’t seem too far off if we were all forced into being nice and happy for the public good.
There could even be infections with positive side-effects, such as increased self-confidence or euphoria. . You can imagine people deliberately contracting such "diseases", associating with known "victims". Perhaps that’s why highly self-assured types tend to attract hordes of admirers. Capsules containing the bugs would be sold illicitly at street corners or pushed in pubs. Maybe national mood-swings could simply be the results of competing epidemics of "positive" and "negative" psychoviruses.
If a "happiness bug" doesn’t exist, could we engineer one? Governments could release it just before general elections. Maybe they’ve been doing it for years. That could explain how they keep on getting back in. OK, that sounds like paranoia, but who’s to say that paranoia’s not caused by yet another pathogen?
Another CHEMTECH piece (August 1997 & there called "Chemistry: the Next Generation). The piece dates from what I reckon was the heyday of Star Trek - not only the TNG films, but also DS9 and Voyager.
"It’s a dilithium initiated living polycyanoacrylate, Captain! Perhaps it can promote tissue regeneration"
I ought to set a few things straight first. I’m only slightly trekky - I don’t speak Klingon, I doubt if I could name more than a small fraction of the planets the Enterprise has visited, and I don’t claim encyclopaedic knowledge of 24th century macromolecules. I would be delighted to learn more from hard-core fans. However, the little that I have picked up, plus what I know about current technology suggest that some interesting breakthroughs are in store.
Let’s start with dilithium crystals. Such compounds are already known, and used, at least on the experimental scale, to make fancy "living" polymers - so called because the polymerisation reaction doesn’t stop unless you deliberately terminate it. Presumably the invention of the warp drive will push up the prices of the compounds, and make them too expensive for such mundane applications.
Apparently, according to Data, "certain cyanoacrylates" emit eichner radiation, which itself promotes plasma plague. Very nasty, and especially worrying for my colleagues over in Superglue Lab, for it is certain cyanoacrylates that make up instant adhesives. They have to be careful already to keep them away from dilithium crystals - they would go off "like a rocket". Sorry.
Eichner radiation would also be worrying in our hospitals, now that surgeons are experimenting with cyanoacrylate tissue adhesives to replace stitches. An outbreak of plasma plague in their wards is the last thing they would want. On the other hand, there are going to be other useful advances in polymer chemistry in the medical field. Polyadrenaline, for instance. That sounds like a powerful drug. Pity I haven’t a clue how to make it - I could patent it up and live on the royalties.
I mentioned Data before. Some fine new macromolecules there - he contains large quantities of tripolymer composites and bioplast sheeting. I’m not quite sure what the exact properties are, but at least 20th century technologists have some clues as to how to make such biomimetic materials. Much trickier is the molecular matrix, for preparing transparent aluminium. Plexicorp are due to "discover" this, with a little help from a time-travelling Scotty, in the next few years. Buy the shares now.
The biggest volume new plastic is going to be polyduranide. The entire hull of the Enterprise is made from it. The manufacturers must have thought it was Christmas when Star Fleet specified it. But as the title of this article suggests, it has its limitations. It gets eaten up by phaser blasts or photon torpedoes, which means that in battle huge amounts of energy have to be diverted to the shields. If we polymer chemists could make some advances there we would really have the Borg and the Dominion worried.
This was published (in slightly edited form) in the lamented Chemical Innovation, April 2001, and then reproduced (with a bit more editing) in (the also lamented) Today's Chemist at Work, March 2003.
As my forty sixth birthday approached earlier this year, my wife asked if there was anything I would particularly like. Looking for inspiration, I wondered if there would be any percentage in suggesting something along the lines of wedding anniversaries – a different substance for every year, but this time based on atomic numbers. Cubic zirconia instead of ruby at forty, neodymium magnets (you get them in the loudspeakers in mobile phones) instead of diamond at sixty. You would have to allow compounds of the respective elements, let’s say twenty mole percent, since not that many are actually used in their native form. And there could be some particularly awkward years – it would be a brave parent who gave their nine year old elemental fluorine.
Some years it works rather well – water is innocuous enough for a one year old, a set of graphite pencils would be very suitable at age six, bronze (tin) just about acceptable at fifty. Gold would make an excellent elemental gift for octogenarians, but sadly it misses out by a year, and the poor old souls would have to make do with mercury thermometers.
Unfortunately, the concept is not always so successful. While a helium balloon would please a two year old, the other noble gas years would lack interest. I don’t suppose an eighteen year old would thank you for an argon lamp. Scandium has a rarity value suitable for twenty one, but you don’t see many artefacts made from it. Brass (zinc), on the other hand is somewhat mundane for thirty. It’s difficult to think of how you could give arsenic to someone approaching a third of a century without also giving the wrong message, likewise bromide at thirty five. And the transuranic years, for those who live that long, would be hazardous and not that easy to arrange.
Next birthday will be a good one for me (silver), but I thought I would leave it until then to suggest the idea to the boss, since element number forty six is palladium, and I didn’t particularly want a new catalytic converter. I couldn’t think of any other uses, so for a while I contemplated generating one of my element-based Last Word reminiscences around the subject, how it had influenced my career and so forth. Not in principle a bad idea. I could spin this out at an essay a year for the rest of my life, except for gold and gadolinium which I covered a few months ago. The lanthanide years would be tedious, but I told myself to view it as a challenge. However, I struggled immediately, having no recollection of ever having handled palladium. It was conceivable, but not certain, that I had catalysed a reaction with it as an undergraduate, but since then our paths hadn’t crossed.
A little research showed that it has more uses than I imagined. However, my delving didn’t help with my birthday. Few applications carry enough of the element to count, while those that do wouldn’t strike most people as celebratory presents. It soaks up a lot of hydrogen, which could be useful if hydrogen fuel cells are ever used to power automobiles, but that’s for the future, and may never happen - is there enough palladium in the world? Besides the obvious uses in catalysis, it also finds its way into jewellery (there’s a little in white gold), electronics and dentistry. Nevertheless, I’m not going to ask for a spot of bridgework.
It’s named after the asteroid Pallas, discovered in the same year, 1803. Given that the asteroid that whacked into Yucatan and saw off the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous was highly enriched in iridium, compared to the Earth’s crust, it would be interesting to see if Pallas is actually a valuable source of its own related Group VIII metal – I imagine it probably is. The bicentenary is also coming up. Perhaps we should declare 2003 to be the Year of the Heterogeneous Catalyst.
But back to birthdays. My daughters will be eight, eleven and thirteen next year, so an aluminium can of mineral (sodium) water (oxygen this time) for each of them would do nicely, and cut down on the costs. This is just as well, since my wife, who also has a chemistry degree, will insist on something made of technetium. I’m not sure where I’m going to find some, but she won’t let me off – I’ve just given her age away.
Another review for Chemistry & Industry (2.3.98)
The Beginning of Creativity?
A favourite cartoon strip of mine comes from “The Wizard of Id” The wizard is complaining to the king that his research budget is almost exhausted. The king snaps that “Money doesn’t grow on trees , you know!”, to which the wizard responds “That’s the project I’m working on.”
That for me is the aim of science (or “The End of Science”, if you will) - using our knowledge to create something useful. Even when I’m not looking for immediate applications, what motivates me is the ability to predict that if we do X to Y something neat should happen. Science is part of the creative process. I expect the vast majority of “Chemistry and Industry” readers would subscribe to that view. So, I imagine, would most practising scientists.
Unfortunately John Horgan has never been a practising scientist. His interest, as befits a “Scientific American” writer, is in coffee-table science. Indeed he ignores chemistry and doesn’t regard applied science as science at all. I don’t imagine, therefore, that he would expect a sympathetic review from an industrial chemist, and he’s not going to get one here.
His thesis is that all the interesting questions in science have either already been answered or are too difficult to answer. Speculative approaches to the difficult questions - the curled up dimensions of superstrings, thoughts on consciousness or the origins of life - he regards as unprovable, and labels them as “ironic” science. (Why “ironic”? I’m not sure.) He doesn’t like philosophic relativism. For him, Darwinism, quantum theory, general relativity are True (his capitalisation), rather than being simply very useful models or concepts. I don’t understand his difficulty here. In my experience scientists are perfectly comfortable in using theories that they know full well are only approximations to the truth, but which work well within strictly defined fields of application.
To gain support for his thesis he interviewed a cohort of Big Name scientists and tried to get them to agree that their areas of interest were virtually exhausted. To their credit, most of them would not go along with him. However, Horgan’s speculation is itself “ironic” as he admits, so he closes most of these sections by suspecting that the illuminati really were of the same mind as him, deep down.
Is there any substance to his idea? Possibly. The one area where he found some support from the practitioners was in particle physics. It is hard to deny that the subject appears to be approaching a plateau. There simply isn’t the money around for ever bigger accelerators. But Horgan feels that the limits are not solely economic, that Theories of Everything will not be confirmed by building a collider the size of Switzerland, that with Quantum ChromoDynamics we have reached the limit of human comprehension. Who knows? I’m sure I don’t, nor will anyone until we try.
Have we reached the limits of biology? Here Horgan is on much weaker ground. There are big questions to be addressed, questions that can be tackled without budgets the size of the economies of medium sized countries, questions that can have concrete answers. Admittedly we can never prove, for instance, that life originated on Earth in any particular way, but the subject is nevertheless open to experimentation. We can do experiments that rule out many scenarios, eliminating the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes put it. Then, when we eventually succeed in creating self-reproducing blobs in the laboratory, we can be certain that we are on the right track.
Philosophers may argue, following Gödel and Turing, that the origin and purpose of animal or human consciousness cannot be understood by animal or human mind, but we shouldn’t be too afraid of the philosophers. We know that other humans, mammals and other higher animals are conscious, even if we can’t prove it to an existentialist. How we know is, I would suggest, part of the same problem. While we don’t have a good handle yet on what causes consciousness, that’s no reason to stop looking. And when we can recreate this biochemically or electronically we will know in the same way that we have succeeded.
Evolutionary biology also seems to be in need of a breakthrough. Horgan’s beloved Darwinian/Mendelian/Watson and Crickian model, phenomenally successful as it has been, seems to be reaching its useful limits. Trying to explain the course of evolution with an individual-level model is equivalent to trying to solve the Wave Equation for the drying of a paint film, or the setting of concrete. Chemists successfully use higher order models for such processes; evolutionary biologists are busy trying to develop analogous models for populations and eco-systems. In spite of Horgan’s denigrations of their attempts, I’m sure they’ll succeed.
There’s a whole host of inter-connected sciences where reductionism is inappropriate, where statistical models and number crunching currently provide our best leads. How about fluid mechanics, solid state chemistry, geology and meteorology? Or psychology, sociology, economics and history? Horgan argues that these sciences are by their very definitions limited, and I suppose he’s correct. But are we approaching those limits? Hardly. Maybe Horgan should have argued that we are reaching the “End of Reductionism” rather than the “End of Science”. A far more defensible title, surely, though I guess it would have put fewer copies of his book on the shelves.
One final question: Does it matter? Here I can confidently say: Assuredly not! A look at our own subject will show why I am so dogmatic. In Horgan’s terms the “End of Chemistry” was reached about fifty years ago with the elucidation of the nature of the chemical bond and the development of X-ray crystallography. But I would see this rather as a beginning. With a sound theoretical framework chemists have been able to turn their subject into something truly creative. We can make molecules and compounds with properties undreamt-of even ten years ago - high temperature superconductors, shape-memory polymers, fullerene cancer-busting drugs. And while the number of useful new combinations we can come up with is probably finite, as of yet there’s no end in sight. We ought to pity the “Horgan Chemists”, that poor breed who call themselves theoretical chemists, strapped for big questions but not creative enough to be real chemists.
The biologists have got enough to be going on with for some time to come, but the physicists should take heart from our story. They have allowed themselves to be duped by the likes of Horgan into thinking that the only exciting facet to their subject is pushing back the theoretical frontiers, and have allowed all the best bits to be hijacked by the engineers, materials scientists and ourselves. They should now be looking for ways to exploit their new knowledge, to build spacecraft that can explore the nearby stars and get the information back before we’re all dead.
I hope I’ve been sufficiently damning, because I have to concede that for all its faults the book exerts an unhealthy attraction. I originally thought I would warn you not to look at it, but on reflection I’m sure that “Chemistry and Industry” readers can be trusted with such stuff. But it’s for consenting adults only. If you’ve a teenage child considering a career in science, keep this book locked away.
This review appeared in Chemistry & Industry 7.5.01 and provoked an exchange of letters in the same journal with Friends of the Earth.
Chemistry and the Simple Life
I recall a sketch in a TV comedy series which involved setting up a branch of the Amish in England. The new converts took the view that since their American co-believers permitted themselves certain artificial materials – iron, soap, glass, paper – then their choice of technological cut-off date had essentially been arbitrary. That being the case then the British Amish were free to choose their own arbitrary date, and had settled on the early 1970s. Thus vinyls and eight-track cartridges were fine, but CDs were forbidden. They couldn’t use personal computers, but big main-frames with card readers and punched tape presented no problems. They had fridges and televisions, but no microwaves or VCRs.
The early 1970s is where Colin Russell’s history of the British chemical industry leaves off. I presume this is because the technological changes that have influenced the daily lives of the general public since then - the laptop, the mobile, the microwave and the video – may have required chemical inputs, but are not viewed as chemical products.
It was also during the early 1970s that the chemical industry, as opposed to chemistry as a school subject, began to impinge on my own consciousness. Two memories stand out: a visit to ICI’s chlor-alkali plant in Runcorn, and the Flixborough explosion. What I recalled from the Runcorn visit wasn’t the utility of the products they made, but the huge amount of electricity they consumed, and the project described by someone at the Castner–Kellner plant trying to find out how small but significant quantities of mercury leaked into the environment. I was totally unaware of the much more polluting processes for making alkali from salt that preceded the electrolytic methods. Similarly with Flixborough: I didn’t think about why they were making caprolactam, simply that this was yet another instance of the poor environmental and safety record of the chemical industry. And remember, I wasn’t your typical tabloid reader, or a green activist. I was a chemistry nut, and fully intended to make a career in that same industry.
And that, I think, is the problem the chemical industry has always had, and probably always will have: that the public, even the small scientifically literate subset of it, are glad to accept the fruits of the industry without thanks, will ignore any social or environmental benefits the industry brings, but will savage the industry for any short-comings. Perhaps this is understandable. The industry’s record has at times been dreadful. But when it improves the lives of ordinary people, or when it reduces the depredations on the natural environment, it deserves credit. And it should be judged by the standards of the time, as applied to any other enterprise.
To dip into the book, the nineteenth century alkali industry is an excellent example. In the early days of the Leblanc process, hydrogen chloride belched into the atmosphere and calcium sulphide was allowed to pile up in reeking tips. Until other businesses grew up around to use these by-products, there was no perfect solution to the waste problem, but much could have been done to minimise the pollution. In fact, the industry did nothing until forced to act by legislation. Egregious. How was it allowed? But consider why the Leblanc process was ever adopted in the first place.
Until the Napoleonic wars, virtually all alkali for soap, bleach, glass and paper had come from timber ash (“potash”). Combined with the demand for charcoal for iron smelting, this had resulted in the deforestation of huge areas of England. While artificial bleaching was expensive, hundreds of acres of good land were tied up for sun-bleaching linen. The new industrial source of alkali allowed these basic products to be made much more cheaply, indeed affordable by the mass of the population. The workforces in the Leblanc factories opposed regulation and legislation, fearing for their jobs. Anyway, the slaughterhouses and the leather tanneries of the day posed much greater environmental problems, as did the lack of proper treatment for human waste. In Benthamite terms it was an easy decision – the alkali industry was too valuable to be closed down.
I’m fond of another illustration, alluded to but not spelt out in the book. The age weighted incidence of all the cancers of the alimentary canal has dropped dramatically with increased use of pesticides. The reason for this is that fresh fruit and vegetables, with all the anti-oxidants they contain, are relatively much less expensive than a few decades ago, and form a bigger part of our diets.
So the chlor-alkali industry is good for the environment, pesticides prevent cancer, industrial chemists are all candidates for beatification? Well hardly. Dreadful incidents such as Bhopal, Seveso, the Sandoz cyanide spill still happen. No industry is without risk, but since the 1970s the chemical industry has cleaned up its act enormously. We continue to be caught out by the unexpected –CFCs and the ozone hole, nonyl phenols and hermaphrodite fish. Even in these areas the industry has acted responsibly in looking for alternatives. Friends of the Earth accuse the industry of dragging its feet and call for immediate bans, but ignore the environmental benefits that the products bring – urethane foams blown with CFCs for instance were superb insulators and made a big contribution to keeping down energy consumption.
The web of interactions between chemistry, society and the environment is clearly a fascinating subject, so I was delighted to be asked to review the book, and great pleasure I had in reading it. Anyone interested in the roots of our industry (and I would hope that all Chemistry and Industry readers would fall into that category) should get hold of a copy. My only quibble is that I wish the book had been bigger. Big important areas are glossed over or ignored completely – I would argue for instance that the paper and synthetic fibre industries are at least as much part of the chemical industry as copper smelting. Both have brought social changes and have had environmental impacts. Polyurethanes aren’t mentioned at all. I would also have liked a chapter on the decline of the British chemical industry since the early 1970s – what was inevitable, what could have been managed better.
Colin Russell and his co-writers have endeavoured successfully to produce a “warts and all” study, to show why the industry developed as it did, but not to ignore the problems that it brought. Unfortunately, those of a dark green tendency who want to see the end of our whole endeavour won’t read it, but at least the book provides powerful ammunition for chemists who want to put up a robust defence.
There are those in Friends of the Earth who freely admit that they want to set the clock back. Not just to the time of Ford Cortinas and purple Crimplene flairs: their long term aim is a greatly reduced human population living a lifestyle similar to that of the (American) Amish. The trouble is that their ideal social system with an Iron Age technology would still put intolerable pressures on the world’s forests. Even Bronze Age foundries caused serious local pollution. The choice is stark: unless we want a return to the Neolithic we need our Chemical Industry.
